Watkins gives a brief biography of Pullman and summarizes his works before the HDM trilogy, which serves as background material for his analysis of the major themes of HDM. This section is pretty straightforward. The book gets meatier when he analyzes HDM itself, investigating themes such as truth, innocence and experience, growing up, authority, and the natures of God and consciousness as portrayed in the books. There's also an interesting sidebar about the demons in HDM where Watkins goes through the process most readers have of trying to figure out exactly what Pullman's demons are; I found his comparison of HDM's tripartite human (body/demon/ghost) to the Holy Trinity especially fascinating.

One problem, though: Watkins chides Pullman for misrepresenting the Church and various Christian doctrines (implying more that Pullman hasn't learned enough about them to understand properly rather than that he's deliberately lying). Yet he blithely asserts that a material universe without a higher power can only be deterministic, with no possibility of free will, and that morality can only come from a wholly good God. This ignores the many, many works in which atheists, agnostics, and other non-believers have argued the contrary. If Watkins is aware of these, he ought to have mentioned them even if only to dismiss them. If he hasn't, then I'd say he's also guilty of misrepresentation.

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